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Comment by sp33der89 | Hacker News Reader

So how is programming in Common Lisp these days? I know a bit of Clojure/Fennel, but I feel like the Common Lisp ecosystem is a lot more fractured(I might very well be wrong tho)?

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Feels alright though I'm still early in relearning it. Going through that Learning CL the hard way[1] plus grabbed On Lisp and slowly working through that as well. I also need to really mess with Quicklisp which I set up to give me a package manager. Alive is a damn good plugin for CL on VS Code if you don't wanna go down the Emacs hole.

It is worth mentioning Hard Way still has a bunch of holes in it, like I got to the chapter on vectors and it is basically blank

[1] - https://llthw.common-lisp.dev/

Same, still trying to get a good book that's pragmatic and for experienced developers. Many starts from the basics, or don't even talk about stuff like Quicklisp and ASDF.

I want a book to make production-ready software in Common Lisp, not to faff around. The Paul Graham "On Lisp" book seems excellent, and I'll dive into it next.

I think "Practical Common Lisp" is pretty good. The wikipedia for it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practical_Common_Lisp

A direct link to the PDF is here too. https://github.com/ccceye/computer-book/blob/master/Practica...

Another interesting one is "Land of Lisp", https://www.amazon.com/Land-Lisp-Learn-Program-Game/dp/15932...

It's more theoretical, but kind of fun. It's a touch more academic (IMHO) than Practical Common Lisp, but pretty good.

Yea this is a thing too, I have no idea what is recommended in the current ecosystem. SBCL + Quicklisp? I don't even really know what ASDF is.

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ ? Implementations, Quicklisp and ASDF explained

Thank you. I have come across your posts about moving from Python to CL, and the work you've been doing with the cookbook and other libraries is very much appreciated.

Your recent efforts might be one of the reasons there is a little bit of Lisp hype on this forum lately :-)

Thank you! That is a very nice resource

If you want true common lisp SBCL is probably the most universally known, and yeah everything I've read indicates one of the first things you should do is download and run the quicklisp setup so you have it working with your environment. Though it is funny how Hard Way did it during initial setup but then hasn't used it at all and I'm a chunk of the way through. Even as a beginner book I'd probably briefly touch on packages because it is so important to modern development.

FYI PG put the PDF up on his site so you can just legally download it.

I have bookmarked this version with restored images: https://www.lurklurk.org/onlisp/onlisp.html

It's not very fractured, especially in open source as many "common libraries" support most implementations.

It very much helps that there's a single standard that is quite rich (unlike Scheme) which makes for much easier portability between implementations, to the point that somewhat common repeated trope was developers using one implementation for faster iteration and another for deployment (for example, CCL for development and SBCL for faster code in deployment, or CCL/SBCL for development and ECL for target deployment).

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